"Who is in charge of this database?"

Everyone on the DBA team shook their head and someone asked, "Is it Oracle or SQL server?"

"I think it is called My SQL," the development manager said.

During my 20 years as a database administrator, that is often how I ended up learning new RDBMS systems. As a result, I know first-hand how challenging it can be to learn another system when you get thrown into the deep end.

New databases are added to a production environment in different ways. A new software application is purchased and the installation requires (or builds) a new database. A developer builds a prototype application for a business unit. When they start using it, it quickly turns into an important system and the database gets handed to the production administrators to maintain and fix when it breaks. Sometimes a company determines that they need to move to a standard database system and away from another. This can require upskilling a whole team of administrators to learn the new system.

You might have been told, "Congratulations! You are now in charge of this database. I know you are an Oracle DBA, but PostgreSQL is almost the same thing so you should be able to handle it."

Yes, they are both relational database management systems

Co-authored by Brian Pace

I was excited to hear that Kubernetes 1.22 was recently released with better support for cgroup-v2 and has support for Linux swap

UPDATE TO THIS CONTENT: Since releasing this article, newer versions of Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes have additional features for streaming replication across clusters. See our post that accompanied the release: Multi-Cloud Strategies with Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes

It's been a busy year building Crunchy Bridge and we've shipped a lot of new awesome things. Instead of doing a wrap-up of all the growth and exciting features, instead I wanted to take the time to try to teach a few more things to those that follow us. While onboarding customer after customer this year I've noted a few key things everyone should put in place right away - to either improve the health of your database or to save yourself from a bad day.

Set a statement timeout

While supporting Crunchy Spatial and Crunchy Bridge clients, I’ve been thinking about how I usually clean messy data. I wanted to talk about regular expressions (regex

As a Solutions Architect at Crunchy Data, I work directly with customers testing and deploying Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes. I often see our customers fully removing a PGO

One of the curious aspects of spatial indexes is that the nodes of the tree can overlap, because the objects being indexed themselves also overlap.

That means that if you're searching an area in which two nodes overlap, you'll have to scan the contents of both nodes. For a trivial example above, that's not a big deal, but if an index has a lot of overlap, the extra work can add up to a measurable query time difference.

The PostGIS spatial index is based on a R-tree

Crunchy Data hosted the third annual PostGIS Day on November 18th.This was our second year with a virtual format and another year of record attendance! We had attendees from more than 99 countries.

PostGIS

One of the many reasons "the answer is Postgres" is due to its extensibility.

The ability to extend Postgres has given rise to an ecosystem of Postgres extensions that change the behavior of the database to support a wide range of interesting capabilities. At Crunchy Data

Did you know that PostgreSQL 12 introduced a way for you to provide multifactor (aka "two-factor") authentication to your database?

This comes from the ability to set clientcert=verify-full as part of your pg_hba.conf